Author
Topic: Automatic Hardware Profiler (Read 1990 times)

Would it be possible to create some kind of hardware profiling system that automatically profiles the hardware on your machine and updates a central database? Rather than just being a list of hardware I was thinking it could be a central repository of drivers that gets updated as people manage to get hardware working.

So for instance when I install LinuxMCE and can't get my VIA graphics card to work straight out of the box, I do some searching on the internet, find the correct drivers and get it working. I then profile my hardware and the drivers I have used get uploaded to the server, so that the next person who installs LinuxMCE gets out of the box support.

I appreciate that this would probably be very complicated to do, but if it is possible it should enable hardware support to expand much more rapidly and with fewer idiots like me wasting experts time.

It would be very complex to do, and probably unnecessary. Most of the driver compatibility issues (hardware) are dealt with automatically within the Ubuntu family at the kernel level as new versions of the kernel, Ubuntu or the drivers come out via update/autoupdate. The issue with LMCE 0710 is that the update system had to be locked down to prevent updates being applied that would break the LMCE part of the software. Once 0810 is released, it is hoped (the current plan, and true of the Alphas so far, I believe) that the update system will be active again, ensuring that any new, relevant drivers for basic hardware compatibility will be downloaded automatically. This isn't the whole story of course, as what the LMCE software will actually work with (eg, it currently uses ALSA for sound, so having the latest OSS driver is not really going to help get a sound card working), but it certainly will help deal with the majority of hardware issues...